Willis Pyle (seated), with Lee Morehouse, working on sketches for Bambi.
Photograph: Disney

During a golden age of film animation, Willis Pyle, who has died aged 101, played a leading role in shaping some of the Walt Disney studio’s best-known characters. As an assistant animator, he cut his teeth on the 1940 musical fantasy Pinocchio. Milt Kahl, a legendary animator known as one of Disney’s “nine old men”, was responsible for the final design, going for a “cute boy” look rather than the “wooden puppet” persona of two previous incarnations that Disney believed would not elicit sympathy from audiences. Pyle then brought Pinocchio to life with his pencil drawings – making him walk and talk, and giving him different facial expressions – that were passed on to the artists in the inking and painting department.

“The character had to act – raise his eyebrows, turn and jump, and react to other characters,” Pyle said. “And the way you could do it was by looking at yourself in a mirror to see what that expression looked like.” In the film, he also drew the memorable scene in which Jiminy Cricket gets dressed at super-fast speed when he is running late.

Continuing as an assistant animator, Pyle drew the cupids for the mythological setting of the Pastoral Symphony scene in Fantasia (1940), and in Bambi (1942) he drew the white-tailed deer of the title, his girlfriend, Faline, Flower, the skunk, and Thumper, the rabbit.

Later, as an animator at UPA (United Productions of America), Pyle was involved in several major successes. He worked on the Oscar-nominated The Magic Fluke (1949), Ragtime Bear (1949) – the first film to feature the near-sighted, accident-prone Mr Magoo – and the Oscar-winning Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), which brought a Dr Seuss story to the screen for the first time, and included Pyle’s sequence of the title character performing sound effects for a nationwide radio audience.

Pyle was born near Lebanon, Kansas, the son of Ben, a farmer, and his wife Maude (nee Acton). When he was two, the family moved to Colorado, first to Bethune, then to Boulder, where he attended high school. He worked in a grocer’s for a year before studying art at the University of Colorado. While there, he was art editor of its satirical magazine, Colorado Dodo, and an advertising illustrator for a Denver clothing store, Gano-Downs.

However, in 1937, Pyle left university during his final year on being presented with the opportunity to join the Disney studios. After seeing a poster of Pluto with the words: “Draw me and earn $25,000 a year”, he had responded. He was told that he had too little experience – but he could have a job in Disney’s traffic department carrying supplies to the animators if he attended evening classes in its art studio. In less than three years, he was an assistant animator.

Pyle joined his colleagues on strike in a dispute over differentiations in staff pay and benefits in 1941 and never returned – he worked on Woody Woodpecker cartoons at Walter Lantz’s studio for six months, before serving in the US Army Air Corps. He spent much of the second world war animating training and propaganda films for the services’ First Motion Picture Unit at the Hal Roach studio in Culver City, California.

After joining UPA in 1946, Pyle earned extra money as a fashion illustrator for the magazines Vogue and Harper’s. In 1950, he moved to New York and opened his own studio, Willis Pyle Productions. For 30 years, he worked alone as an animator from the Abbey Victoria hotel, near the Rockefeller Center. “I was offered [full-time studio] jobs, but I wanted to get up from my desk and go to the Museum of Modern Art at three o’clock in the afternoon if I wanted to, or go to Macy’s and buy a tie,” he said in 2010.

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Pyle made hundreds of television commercials, Peanuts cartoons, the Emmy award-winning Dr Seuss TV special Halloween Is Grinch Night (1977) and the film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), directed by Richard Williams.

At the age of 68, he retired from animation – although he made a brief return in 1989 with the television series This Is America, Charlie Brown – to concentrate on painting in oils and watercolours. He had exhibitions at the Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, in Manhattan, for more than 20 years.

Pyle was predeceased by his wife, Virginia (nee Morrison), whom he married in 1946, and his brother, the actor Denver Pyle – best known for his roles in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and The Dukes of Hazzard. He is survived by his nephews, Tony and David.

•Willis Acton Pyle, animator and painter, born 3 September 1914; died 2 June 2016